
Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X'It's a No-Brainer': NYC and SF Tech Workers Move to LA for Sun, Space and Cheaper Rent During the Pandemic
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part series. Read the second part here: The exodus from L.A. Tech workers who traded cramped one-bedroom apartments by the ocean for 4-bedroom houses in Las Vegas.
Roger DaSilva, who grew up in New Jersey and lived in New York for two decades, long dreamed about trading the honking horns and gridlock of Manhattan for the sand and ocean breezes of Manhattan Beach.
"When I would visit L.A., it just felt like a different country with the people, the easy going nature, and the genuine friendliness of the people," said DaSilva. "It's that laid back vibe, and I love the beach and the sun."
But there was one thing stopping the move. DaSilva is an outsourced chief financial officer so he can work from anywhere, but his wife works at an advertising agency, which required her to be in the New York office full-time. Then COVID-19 hit and the DaSilva's could work from anywhere. In June, they listed their Murray Hill three-bedroom home and rented a house in Venice Beach while they searched for something more permanent.
"If it weren't for COVID, we would still be in New York," DaSilva said.
The DaSilvas are one of more than a dozen professionals interviewed by dot.LA who suddenly found themselves untethered to offices during the pandemic and decided to abandon their cramped apartments in emptied out New York and San Francisco to finally realize their dream of living by the beach. They cited a mix of personal and professional reasons for moving – a growing tech scene, relatively more affordable housing, and the ability to live a better lifestyle.
To be sure, more people are leaving Los Angeles than arriving during the pandemic, accelerating a yearslong trend of migration to cheaper cities such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Sacramento. But for those coming from New York or San Francisco who are wealthy enough to afford million dollar-plus mortgages, L.A. still offers a relative bargain. According to Zillow, the median home value in San Francisco is $1,447,191 and the median rental price in San Francisco is $4,500 compared to $752,508 for homes in Los Angeles and $3,500 for rentals.
Nick Dowdle, growth product manager at the real estate startup ZeroDown, was shelling out $2,400 a month to rent a cramped room in a three bedroom townhouse in San Francisco's trendy Castro District until recently moving to Marina Del Rey. He is now spending $2,100 a month to rent his own one-bedroom in a luxury complex that includes a pool, hot tub and outdoor gym.
"It's a no-brainer," said Dowdle. "My productivity has gone up and I've been happier. If I have to work from home, I'd rather be somewhere warm and sunny."
Feverish demand, driven by the likes of Dowdle and DaSilva, has driven L.A. asking prices up by 17% from a year ago, twice the average increase nationwide.
"Prices are growing like never before," said Taylor Marr, lead economist at Redfin. "There is a massive price appreciation in what sellers can ask for."
Ferocious bidding wars have returned and realtors say they are getting so much interest from New Yorkers that they can hardly keep up, especially on the city's more prosperous Westside.
"It's as if as soon as COVID-19 hit everyone wanted to flee New York," said Nina Kubicek, a global luxury realtor at Coldwell Banker. "We couldn't believe how inundated we got this year with a flood of New Yorkers and East Coast clients that either want to lease or purchase here."
In typical years, Kubicek says she would receive calls from New Yorkers every few months, but now it is several a week and she is forced to turn down clients. "I have never been this busy in 16 years of doing this," she said, a far cry from the doomsday slowdown she and others in the real estate industry expected after the pandemic struck in March. "In May, I started getting slammed."
Even though New York now has a significantly lower number of COVID cases than Los Angeles, former New Yorkers say the virus had a much bigger impact on the quality of their day-to-day lives.
"It seems like the most cliché thing to say, but I feel like a more healthy person," said Ajay Mehta, a tech founder who moved from New York to Echo Park during the pandemic. "I've been running a ton outside and cooking more since I have a bigger kitchen."
"I had a tiny one-bedroom on the Lower East Side and being stuck in there would have been so depressing," continued Mehta. He lived in New York for a decade and dreaded the prospect of enduring another winter, especially during the pandemic. "I have a nice, airy apartment here. And it's much easier to be socially distant."
Los Angeles has long been criticized, especially by New Yorkers, for being too spread out and car dependent. But during COVID-19, instead of a liability, L.A.'s vastness has become an advantage while New York's density is a liability.
"With the lockdown there was so much closed in New York," said Joshua Coiro, an analytical lead at Google, who moved with his wife from Brooklyn to Santa Monica in August. "You don't have a car. You're relying on public transportation. It felt really dire."
Coiro plans to eventually return to New York, but he says he and his wife saw COVID-19 as the chance to try something new. "In this current environment it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up," he said. "We're not even a month in but we're loving it. The people and the vibe is different from what you experience in the Northeast."
Continuing a trend from last year, L.A. was the most common destination for New Yorkers leaving the city from May to August, according to data from United Van Lines. Redfin estimates 4.6% of New Yorkers leaving the city went to L.A. during the second quarter of this year, up from 3.9% in the first quarter, according to Redfin data. That is hardly a dramatic shift, but Marr says it still means an influx of tens of thousands of residents.
"That can translate to a big impact," he said. "L.A. has consistently been the top spot for people leaving the Bay Area, battling with Seattle. What we have seen over time is a little bit of an acceleration of these trends."
Moving for Career Reasons
Aside from the weather and the beach, some who have moved during the pandemic were drawn to L.A. for more than a lifestyle upgrade – they thought L.A. with its burgeoning tech scene would be a better place for their careers. COVID-19 made the decision easier.
"It used to be taboo to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles if you were in tech," said Dowdle.
Mehta lived for two years in San Francisco and says it would not have made sense to start his consumer-focused tech company, which sells customized astrological candles there.
"San Francisco is not a very culturally in-touch city." Mehta said. "Everyone is working on a SaaS [software as a service] company. They're not working on companies that are tapping into culture."
Elizabeth Skube, head of communications at Openpath Security Inc, relocated from San Francisco to Venice last month. She says she "fully hated San Francisco" but did not consider moving to L.A. until the pandemic because she worried it would hinder her career in tech. "I never thought of L.A. in that way," said Skube. "I thought I had to be in San Francisco."
But that mindset is changing. James Beshara, former director of product at Airbnb who's now an angel investor, had been eyeing moving from San Francisco to L.A. for some time after seeing more of his founder friends go south. "COVID just accelerated a move that I had been thinking about for a few years now," he said.
Beshara predicts there will continue to be a snowball effect from more founders and investors setting up shop in L.A.
"The lifestyle choice of living in a coastal city with amazing weather and it being such a creative hub is going to lead to even more creatives wanting to live here," he said, while adding that moving to L.A. still does carry a degree of stigma in the tech community. "As soon as I announced moving here, it was like I was plugged into so many private conversations of founders wanting to move down here that have been keeping it a secret."
It's always been a short flight to San Francisco, but Beshara says now that investors have gotten used to doing so much business that does not require face-to-face meetings, he worries even less about staying in contact with his Bay Area network, which is still the tech nexus after all.
"I interact with them daily via text, email, Facetime, Zoom and Twitter just as much as I did in San Francisco," Beshara said. "But now I get to do that from a sunny location with a beach across the street."
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Inspectiv Raises $8.6M To Build a Better Cybersecurity Platform
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
What do education startups, maternal care platforms and Minecraft servers have in common? They’re all susceptible to hacking.
Also, businesses in each industry use software created by Manhattan Beach-based Inspectiv, which announced Thursday that it’s raised an $8.6 million Series A round to continue developing its artificial intelligence that detects and wipes out security threats.
The new funds bring the total Inspectiv has raised to $16.6 million since its 2018 launch. Founder and chairman Joseph Melika told dot.LA the company’s recent growth has largely been steered by the pandemic as companies put a higher value on data security.
The heightened need for better security, according to Melika, is due to recent changes in how people work. “Just people, frankly, getting distracted,” he said, has made some businesses more vulnerable to hackers.
“They’re working remotely, their laptops are from home [with] no firewall,” he said, adding that has left a lot of systems potentially exposed to hacks.
Inspectiv’s risk management platform runs autonomously 24/7 and is constantly scanning for threats, Melika said. The software isn’t just run on A.I., it's also combined with a network of security researchers. Melika said part of Inspectiv’s intelligence comes from the input of thousands of researchers.
Once it finds a threat, the software alerts Inspectiv, whose vulnerability spot-checkers verify it and identify it to the client. Then, Inspectiv scans its other clients for the same threat, or similar invasions that could be lurking. There’s also the potential for the software to review backup files, in case a company wants to make sure no older resolved threats spring back to life.
Melika pointed out several current Inspectiv clients using its software are local, including GoGuardian, maternal care company Mahmee and Minehut, a platform for people to host custom “Minecraft” servers.
The funding round was led by StepStone Group, among a suite of existing Inspectiv investors including Westwood-based Fika Ventures, San Francisco’s Freestyle Capital and Santa Monica-based Mucker Capital.
CEO Ryan Disraeli (left) and Founder and Chairman Joseph Melika (right)
Courtesy of Inspectiv
Inspectiv also announced a leadership transition this week alongside several new hires – former CEO and co-founder of fraud prevention service Telesign Ryan Disraeli will take the reins as CEO of Inspectiv, while Melika will remain on board as the company’s board chairman.
“Inspectiv is really helping secure the internet, and that was something that personally I could get passionate about,” Disraeli said. “To be able to work with a team of people that we brought in that also has that security background, but also experience scaling up organizations was a pretty exciting opportunity.”
The company also hired Karen Nguyen as chief revenue officer, Ray Espinoza as chief information security officer and Ross Hendrickson to be vice president of engineering. Disraeli said the Inspectiv team is currently 22 people but the company is “adding aggressively to that number” by expanding its product development team.
Disraeli wouldn’t disclose revenues but told dot.LA he’s confident he can grow Inspectiv quickly.
“There's a lot of companies raising money that don't have customers and don't have real growth,” Disraeli said. “This is a company that has real customers that are growing and growing with us.”
- Santa Barbara Cybersecurity Startups Raise Millions - dot.LA ›
- NVISIONx Cybersecurity Startup Raised $4.6M in Seed Funding ... ›
- Orca Security Lands $230M as it Looks to Grow in Los Angeles - dot ... ›
- Obsidian Cybersecurity Startup Raises $90 Million - dot.LA ›
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.